Around here lately, while Tim has been replacing stair treads, putting up walls, painting the basement, swapping out bedroom doors and otherwise working on this house we’re hoping to finish, I’ve been in charge of keeping us both fed. This is an unusual arrangement for us, me in the kitchen and him elsewhere, and it’s made me realize how thankful I am to usually be working with him at the sink or stove, side by side. It’s also made me realize, with not a little surprise and maybe terror, that I have a goooood appetite these days. People keep asking me if I’m having pregnancy cravings, and I guess I don’t know. Can I blame the second trimester or should I just be real and admit I’ve always been a fan of Let’s Try This New Recipe, which is much easier to make happen when it’s just me alone at the fridge. If you’re following along with us on Facebook, you’re getting a regular diet of This Was a Good One posts, and I hope you’re enjoying it as much as I am, because with the exception of a corn flour cake (three ingredients to make a fluffy cake? I should have known better.), I’m finally trying out and liking so many things I’ve pinned and pined for. The only negative, and I don’t even know if it’s worth calling a negative, especially after I’ve swapped stories with friends who literally could barely keep down water for months of their pregnancies, is that once I make something and have some, I generally don’t want anymore of it, at all, no thanks, no how. I keep making things and they’re fine and good even, but then my short attention span and I are over it. Besides that and my belly and some crazytown emotional mood swings, I feel pretty normal overall and sometimes almost forget there’s a baby hanging out inside of me, just until I start feeling all his wild kicks in my belly before bed at night. Anyway! I don’t know if a window into my little personal pregnancy journey is interesting to anyone besides me and Tim and my mom, but I’m forcing myself to record at least a few baby-brain thoughts here, if only because I know I’ll want to remember them.

Back to our food lately: Tonight’s dinner experiment did not go at all as I had planned. I’d envisioned spiralized carrot noodles (aka coodles!), tossed in a fun peanut sauce, maybe with some sautéed kale. But then my beautiful organic rainbow carrots from last week’s Green Bean Delivery box were too skinny to make full-on noodles, yielding little carrot curls instead, and in order to justify the fact that I’d pulled out the spiralizer to begin with, I wound up making sweet potato noodles (swoodles?) and roasting them into crispy curly fries. A giant onion-carrot hash cozied up with an entire bunch of kale to make a sautéed vegetable purée that, thanks to a quick bath in some peanut garlic sauce, became a spicy-Thai-reminiscent dinner, topped with the crispy swoodles for crunch. I was a little heavy-handed with the cayenne pepper in the sweet potatoes, so the dinner definitely needs a starch on the side—rice or toast would be best—but it was actually a surprising winner, as was the banana shake I found online and made later for dessert. If you’re looking for a hearty bowl of vegetable-loaded comfort food, kind of like a new take on a killer bowl of curry, this is the ticket. Oh and PS! A few little announcements down below, just before the recipe.

Hey, Asheville! If you live near Asheville, North Carolina and/or are interested in attending a cool, sustainability-focused fair, we’d love to see you at the Mother Earth News Fair in April. We’ll be there with our publishers on Saturday, April 11, and we’re planning to bring Tim’s sourdough bread.

Spiralizers! Oh and we can’t talk about spiralizers so many times in a post and not tell you which one we use. It’s this spiralizer. I waited forever to finally buy it but I shouldn’t have because it does something no other kitchen gadget can do. I love making things into oodles.

Spicy Peanut Kale Bowls + Shoestring Sweet Potato Fries
Serves two

I’m writing the directions in the order of how I made things, but you could alternatively make the peanut sauce ahead of time, maybe even the kale hash ahead of time. I would probably make the sweet potatoes though fresh on the night you want to serve.

The only other thing you need to know about this recipe is that, kind of like a good curry bowl, it really needs some rice or bread alongside to balance out the spice. We ate heaping helpings atop toast, but alongside a big bowl of rice would also make sense. The starch helps soak up some of the spiciness and completes the meal.

Directions:for the fries: Preheat the oven to 400F degrees and get out a rimmed baking sheet. Combine all the sweet potato fries ingredients on this baking sheet, tossing together to coat. Bake for 15 minutes or until crisp, tossing once.

for the peanut sauce: In a small saucepan over medium heat, combine all the ingredients and let the mixture cook down for about 10 to 15 minutes, until thick enough to coat the back of a spoon. If it’s a little thinner and you’re impatient, it will still work, too.

for the kale bowl: In your biggest skillet, melt coconut oil and add salt, pepper, turmeric and ginger, letting spices toast for a few minutes. Add onion slices, stirring them to coat in the spice mixture. Add carrots and stir together. Cook for about 15 minutes, until vegetables are all very soft. Last thing is to add the kale and water, letting the mixture cook until the kale wilts and shrinks and mixes in with the onions and carrots well. This will be quick, just a few minutes.

to serve: Add about half the peanut sauce to the kale mixture or, enough to coat the kale without making everything soupy. Pile kale mixture atop pieces of toast or bowls of rice and add sweet potato fries on top of that.

*cayenne – be gentle! although if you’re heavy-handed like me, a nice starch will cover over it.

You say that you can’t cook; I say, Give it time. I know it looks like people are born with fresh muffins coming out of their ovens, but it’s not true. Everybody starts somewhere. And the first time you try to cook, especially if that first time is when you’re no longer a kid and there’s nobody around to tell you what to do, it’s scary because you don’t know what will happen. Everybody knows this. Most people forget this, but everybody knows this. We all have different motivations for trying something in the kitchen at the beginning: adventure, curiosity, boredom, hunger, need. Whatever yours is, I probably felt it at one point or another. I grew up in a cooking household, the kind where my mom made dinner every night and my grandma’s life centered around what was simmering on the stove. I don’t remember learning from them to love to eat; I think I absorbed it naturally, the way I absorbed language or liking to laugh. Learning to cook was something different, though. Learning to cook took time—takes time—I mean, because, in a lot of ways, learning to cook is something I’ll be doing for the rest of my life.[Read more…]

The main reason I am posting this recipe is because the Napa cabbage we’ve been getting in our farm share lately has convinced me there is no prettier vegetable on earth. From those lacy leaves to that ombre green color, Napa cabbage is seriously stunning. I don’t often pick up a vegetable simply because it looks nice—I mean, there was that one time—but if I were going to start doing it again, Napa would be the one. It’s a star. And talking about Napa cabbage’s beauty is worth talking about because, as far as lists go, Prettiest Vegetables is probably one of the only ones it’d make. I mean, when was the last time you ordered Napa cabbage at a restaurant? Received it on your plate when dining in the home of friends? Looked twice at it in the produce section and brought it home? What do you think about Napa cabbage, if you’ve tried it? Has it registered as something worth shouting about? The thing about Napa cabbage is, despite its curb appeal, it’s still cabbage. Roughage. A colon cleanser. That brings me to the second reason I am posting this recipe: It’s a good one for cleaning things out (and I don’t mean from your refrigerator). [Read more…]

We’d been home 15 minutes when Tim said he felt like going out. Our plane from Chicago to Nashville had been delayed, then delayed again, so by the time we were standing in our kitchen, suitcases unopened and the source of that very unfortunate musty smell that had greeted us when we’d arrived yet to be discovered, it was already past 8 p.m. Nonetheless, “let’s do it” were the words that came out of my mouth in response to his. I’d been gone almost a week, and we’d been together with family for several days. Spending time alone together, even just going to the grocery store before it closed on Tuesday night, felt like luxury.

Chocolate pudding has always been my comfort food—and, contrary to what the title of this post might suggest, my momma makes a great one. That hot, creamy Cook N’Serve of my childhood was pure heaven to the both of us more nights than I can count. We’d pull out the tiny cardboard box, rip open a paper envelope, combine the contents with milk on the stove and whisk and heat that mixture until it grew into a thick, creamy, throat-coating dessert. I liked it best when it was hot, almost steaming. But we’d both also eat it cold, having been covered with wrap in the fridge. It was milky. It was rich. It was the first thing I’d reach for when I’d had a rough day. But lately, I’ve been learning there’s more than one kind of creamy, chocolate comfort.

If you haven’t already heard of The Sprouted Kitchen Cookbook, named for the blog Sara and Hugh Forte keep by the same name, you’re probably not a food blogger (nor someone who follows The James Beard Awards, for which it is a recent nominee). Last summer, when the book first launched, I only slightly exaggerate that about nine out of ten food blogs I followed featured the book at one point or another. And it’s not hard to see why.

Like the blog, the Sprouted Kitchen book is gorgeous, filled with colorful, crisp images on every spread. The recipes are focused on whole foods, from lentil meatballs in lemon pesto (the closest thing to non-meat meatballs I’ve ever had!) to flourless chocolate-banana pudding cakes (souffle-esque and wonderful). While, true, we’ve mentioned this book briefly here before, last fall when we had Sara’s mashies n’ greens (our kale mashed potatoes), we wanted to highlight it again, partly because we love how kind and approachable Sara is—something anyone who’s interacted with her can see—and partly because of one recipe in particular that has blown us away: this buckwheat harvest tart. [Read more…]

A few Saturdays ago, wearing red lipstick and riding boots, I took a free Mexican cooking class with my old Nashville roommates, Sara and Sarah. We met in a bright, sunny space dubbed the grocery store’s “community room,” where the tall ceiling stretched as high as a church building’s and the kitchen featured two portable stoves. While Sara asked questions and Sarah sipped iced coffee with sunglasses perched atop her head, all three of us leaned forward from our third row seats to get closer looks as a man named Michael flashed through a handful of demonstrations, beginning with tortilla soup and ending with fried avocados on sticks.

Michael, who looked a little like a stoic Ron Howard, gave constant tips and tricks to our little, informal group of around 16 as he worked. He explained how to chop an onion (sort of like this), why he likes polenta as a soup thickener (the flavor), when to add spices (to oil, before liquid, as most are fat-soluble). When he completed a dish, we tasted—and, no one is more surprised than I am to say this, but the taste I liked best was the quesadillas. [Read more…]

It should come as no surprise that the day after I finished The Fault in Our Stars, the New York Times bestseller written by John Green and given to us as a gift New Year’s Day by Sonja and Alex, Tim and I were in the kitchen mixing and rolling homemade gnocchi dough, he with the camera, me with flour-covered fingers, watching the sunlight streak across our dining room table and the giant bamboo cutting board I gave Tim as a gift two years ago.

It should come as no surprise because, at least according to Instagram, most of you already know about this book, one of those classic star-crossed love stories that, at the end, leaves you looking at life in a different way from when you’d started, which in my case meant grabbing Tim and sobbing about how thankful I am to have him and about how I hope he knows, like really knows, that I feel so remarkably blessed and happy to share his life.

There’s this one line in particular, towards the end of the story, that’s stayed with me since I turned the last page Friday night, one that sort of echoes a theme reoccurring in the book:[Read more…]

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"That's at the root of all giving, don't you think? At the root of all art. You can't hoard the beauty you've drawn into you; you've got to pour it out again for the hungry, however feebly, however stupidly. You've just got to." Elizabeth Goudge

"If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world." J.R.R. Tolkien

"Every kind word spoken, every meal proffered in love, every prayer said, can become a feisty act of redemption that communicates a reality opposite to the destruction of a fallen world." Sarah Clarkson